Re: st: RE: truncate variable names

[SCHOUMAKER Bruno <bruno.schoumaker@uclouvain.be>]

Nick, I agree I could do that in principle. But the thing is that my 
syntax is used to generate a large number of excel files containing 
cross-tabulation of variables; the names of the files are the names of 
the variables;  and I use a word file with links to these files. So I 
would need to change the links to the excel files in the word file if 
the variable names (and file names) were changed...

So your solution helps me a lot :-)

Bruno

Le 26/07/2010 16:58, Nick Cox a écrit :
> You can do exactly that if all the abbreviations to the first 8 letters are distinct. As said, you'd need to check that any way.
>
> Nick
> n.j.cox@durham.ac.uk
>
> SCHOUMAKER Bruno
>
> Thanks a lot !
>
> I agree it may seem a bad idea; Actually, I had a program running with
> variables names truncated to 8 characters (exported from SPSS using an
> old stat/transfer version) -  I received a new data set (same data, but
> with additional observations), exported from SPSS with a new version of
> stat/transfer, but with variables names longer than 8. And it would save
> me a lot of time if I could just re run the syntax with exactly the same
> variable names...
>
> Le 26/07/2010 16:43, Nick Cox a écrit :
>
>    
> > renvars, trim(8)
> >
> > where -renvars- is downloadable from the SJ files. -search renvars- for
> > precise location.
> >
> > Note that the first principles solution
> >
> > foreach v of var * {
> > 	local new = substr("`v'", 1, 8)
> > 	rename `v' `new'
> > }
> >
> > is more instructive about principles but will fail part-way through if
> > two or more variable names have the same first 8 characters. -renvars-
> > warns you of that problem in advance, so that you can rethink strategy.
> >
> > By the way, this strikes me as mostly a bad idea unless you are
> > exporting to some other software that requires it.
> >      
> SCHOUMAKER Bruno
>
>    
> > I would like to truncate the variable names of my dataset to 8
> > characters.
> >
> > Does anybody know how I can do that in Stata ?
> >      
> *
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>    


--
Bruno SCHOUMAKER

Centre de recherche en démographie et sociétés
Université catholique de Louvain
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1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
BELGIUM

Tel. +32 10 474136
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bruno.schoumaker@uclouvain.be
www.uclouvain.be/demo

*
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